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Words-worth: Cascade

Do you 'cascade' information? Or do you just give it to people straight?

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Published: 01 Mar 2010

Last Updated: 31 Aug 2010

To 'cascade' announcements is to feed them in at the top level of your
organisation and let them trickle to the bottom. It's a metaphor. A real
'cascade', of course, is a waterfall, or, more specifically, one of
those garden features in which water runs over a pile of rocks in a
series of little falls. It comes from the Italian cascata, which just
means 'a fall'. Did this piece of jargon come from close observation of
the effect of gravity on water? Perhaps, but there are several other
possibilities. In electronic engineering, to 'cascade' devices - for
instance, amplifiers - is to connect them one to another for cumulative
effect. The word also has a number of arcane uses in computing. And in
game theory and economics, 'information cascades' explain the tendency
of people to follow the herd. But it doesn't really matter where
'cascading' comes from; if you are at the bottom, dribbled on from a
great height, you will find it equally infuriating.